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About This Episode

On 10/8/2016, the StarTalk All-Stars packed the room at NY Comic Con to discuss the real science in science fiction. Now you can get your geek on with All-Stars hosts Charles Liu and Emily Rice, co-host Chuck Nice, and Phillip K. Dick Award nominated author PJ Manney. Join us for a panel discussion and questions from the audience that run the gamut from mutant cyborgs and artificial intelligence, to life on exoplanets and asteroid mining. You’ll hear about the potential for life on Proxima B, an exoplanet only 4 light years from Earth, and NASA’s efforts to avoid contaminating alien life, similar to Star Trek’s prime directive. The panel debates whether radiation or psychological dangers pose a greater threat to the colonization of the solar system. Explore which technological advances from science fiction are more likely to happen in the next few decades, and whether they’ll only be available to the wealthy: genomics and designer babies, tricorders and wearable medical technology, and space travel. Not surprisingly, the conversation keeps coming back to robots and AI. Will artificial intelligence become dangerous the way Stephen Hawking fears, like the Microsoft Twitterbot that learned to be a sexist, racist neo-Nazi from social media? Will bad actors create malevolent AI, the way Elon Musk predicts? Will it be benevolent, as in Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke’s Time Odyssey series, or insane, like the Kree Supreme Intelligence? And what about sexbots? (WARNING: Contains Adult Language.)